Day 14 - Poetry in motion
[ Jun 27 2004, 20:12 ]Yesterday's entry mentions the addition of a silly Limerick to this site's index page. I was optimistically hoping to see a the change reflected in the test searches today and I have not been disappointed. I know it's Sunday and I should be entertaining the children or cleaning the car or something but I couldn't resist having a peek.
Positions improve a tad
I checked this morning and everything looked the same - positions and Google's cache. Later, (probably early in the morning in California), the changes were reflected in the cache and the positions now stand at 26 for a general web search and 18 for UK specific search, which is OK but a but dissapointing.
Why am I not no.1?
This is a question I'm often asked by clients who quite understandably don't spend their lives reading about and experimenting with websites and search engines, (unlike some sad individuals I could mention). However, having covered most of the obvious aspects of improvinng a site's rank for a specific search term I do now need to have a look at why the sites above this are above this one.
Now we're getting nearer to the top it's feasable to work through each of the better ranked sites and have a look at links, content, structure and any other apparent aspects that might accidentally or deliberately be caasing them to appear higher than this one. The site that appears immediately above this one as I write is using an amzingly blatant spam technique commonly knows as cloaking.
Cloaking - what it is and why it's considered spam.
Without getting into the technical aspects of all the various methods of cloaking, put simply cloaking is a term given to the practice of coding a web page so that a search engine, for example, sees one thing while you and I will see another. The site in this instance is using a 'noscript' tag packed with keywords. Noscript tags are intended to offer an alternative to JavaScript, but this site doesn't even bother pretending to have a script tag that might justify a noscript tag, and is only there to increase its keyword density.
Confused? Bored?
I don't want to mention the site in question or link to it and I'm hoping that by the time you read this I'll have managed to rise up the listings again. So, instead of showing you someone else's spam I'll create a more ligitimate use of the noscript cloaking method and add another paragraph to this page when it's ready.
On second thoughts...
I'm hesitating. I'm not sure that stuffing a load of keywords in a noscript tag will benefit anyone. A quick look through other sites higher up has reassured me that this really shoudn't be necessary. I'll save this as a last resort and spend some time looking at links.